Adam Rapp’s unabashedly complicated, literary-inspired two-person play makes its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre, following a successful New York run that garnered no fewer than six Tony nominations. So it’s not a new work, but its themes and gorgeous, unashamedly erudite writing make it one of the strongest offerings in the Traverse Theatre’s Fringe programme.

It is not for nothing that literary references collide in Rapp’s Ivy League thriller and love story. Bella Baird is a Yale professor of creative writing and discovers a particularly dedicated but eccentric student in her freshman class – Christopher. Although she is actually focusing on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and PunishmentChristopher admits that his life was defined by the writing of his first novel, about a creative writing student suspiciously similar to himself and his enigmatic friendship with a young boy.

Rapp’s work is an elaborate work of art in which the lines between what is real, what is fiction, and what is mere imagination are continually challenged, and in which themes and ideas recur in a deliberately writerly architecture, as Bella shocks her young charge with one of the most difficult questions of all. At times it feels like a complex clockwork mechanism is being set in motion before us, its ultimate purpose seeming crucial but elusive. But even in his abstract philosophical discussions, author Rapp maintains a sense of human warmth and need between his two increasingly interdependent characters.

Madeleine Potter is calm and commanding in her role as the academic, exuding intellectual authority but also surprised by her student’s disarming confidence and even brusqueness. Eric Sirakian, on the other hand, suggests a fragility beneath Christopher’s biting sarcasm and betrays a childlike enthusiasm behind his suicidal rejection of modern mores.

Director Matt Wilkinson delivers a production of fierce concentration, in which his actors speak quietly but with piercing clarity, guiding the ear through Rapp’s literary ideas and allusions with playful wit and provocation. Elliot Griggs’ lighting design in particular highlights these two lonely figures against the often grim darkness with sometimes clinical effectiveness.

The sound inside is a sometimes bewildering examination of creativity and mystery that wears its literary inspirations like badges of honor, but still has a very human heart.

So young, Traverse Theater ★★★

There is no shortage of themes to explore in Douglas Maxwell’s new four-hander comedy of manners. So young in the same place, from intergenerational resentment to remembering the dead, from friendship to betrayal, from rites and traditions to the inevitability of change.

The format of the film, however, is familiar – perhaps too familiar. Liane and Davie spend an evening with their old friend Milo. They have known him since their university days, but he has just revealed that there is a new person in his life: the spirited student Greta, who is more than twenty years younger than him. Over the course of a tense and brutally honest evening, opinions are expressed and more and more startling details are revealed as the quartet slowly approaches a fragile solution.

So young feels very much like Maxwell’s dinner-party crisis play, and he eagerly embraces the form rather than subverting it for his own ends. His writing is as delightfully idiomatic and devastatingly witty as anywhere else in his vast body of work, and he has a knack for caustic Glaswegian put-downs. In fact, Maxwell’s humour is so caustic and effective that it threatens to overshadow the serious issues he addresses – perhaps one reason why, despite his wealth of subject matter, few seem to hit their mark convincingly. His insights into growing older sometimes feel a little copied and pasted, as a character pauses to reminisce about earlier times or reflect on the inevitability of death, while his handling of the sensibilities of 40-year-olds versus 20-year-olds adds little to what we might already suspect.

That is, the excellent cast (Picture above: lr Lucianne McEvoy, Andy Clark, Yana Harris, Nicholas Karimi, photo by Aly Wright) fills in many of the subtleties in some good and incisive performances – Lucianne McEvoy in particular as the insulted teacher Liane is full of genuine anger that turns into barely suppressed grief and resentment. Andy Clark has a little less to go on as her witty long-term husband Davie, while Nicholas Karimi as the grieving Milo remains somewhat of an enigma: is his new love real, as he and Yana Harris’s strong, confident Greta insist, and who gets to decide what that even means?

Traverse artistic director Gareth Nicholls’ direction is accurate and clearly conceived, and Kenny Miller’s boho set provides a convincingly naturalistic backdrop for the evening’s decidedly uncomfortable dialogue. So young has a lot to offer – with expertly judged performances, plenty of laughs and some big ideas behind it all. Perhaps its dense web of interconnected themes shows how difficult it is to separate them from one another, or perhaps it just stays too true to its tried and tested format. It’s a thoroughly entertaining show, but it might not make you think too hard about the questions it raises.